Month: August 2012

This is it. Really. I know I said it all many times before, but all those times weren’t actually it. This time, though, it’s what Douglas Adams calls the final, real, ultimate it.

At least, I think so.

I spent today putting the finishing touches on the Shaped page on Google Play. Since the last posting I’ve discovered that it’s pretty darn easy to get published on Android, and we’ve been devoting our energies towards that market as well. On the whole, Android has been a much smoother experience – a one time, $25 fee to be able to sell an app (it’s free if you’re releasing apps for nothing) beats Apple’s $100 per year fee for the privilege of earning them money. Also, Android is open source. I’ve found it so nice to upload an .apk of the game to my public Dropbox and then be able to download the most recent build or give it to someone for free. Apple makes you register each device as a testing device in order to make a build for it. Essentially we have to hand someone Eric’s iPhone in order for them to try it out on that platform.

Even though we thought the game was locked back in July (fools that we were) we have continued to tweak. I’m beginning to see what they mean by the dangers of “feature creep.” The temptation to add this one new feature here, and to utterly revamp the tutorial process, and to modify the titles creen has been enormous. Of course I’m satisfied with the game as a product as it stands – we’re quite proud of it in fact. But we also see the appeal of constantly… adding more. At times I feel like a computer calculating the digits of pi. I was working, I was generating more… but I was never really finished. At some point, you have to plant the flag and declare victory.

In other news, last month Eric got hired as a content developer for a serious games company out in California. I’ll let him tell you about the experience – which sounds awesome – but I just wanted to throw out there that we’re still working together to get this game out. The miracle of modern technology: we’ve been working together via Google Hangout and email, and it’s been pretty effective. Good to know! Both of us are thinking we’d like to try to make another game after Shaped. This time, a co-op networked game that we can play as we make it.

I’ll update when the game goes live – then I hope we can write a post-mortum summing up this 9-month experience.